Condemned to Life
by Erotillectual
Summary: One-shot (in two parts). He left her so she could live a happy, human life. How could everything have gone so horribly wrong? (NM AU, canon couples, and heartfail).
1. Chapter 1

**Note:** i wrote this in my head years ago, an a few days ago was finally inspired (for no apparent reason) to actually write it down. It's really bleak, which is strange, because I'm so ridiculously happy right now. Why would I write something like this? It's so sad, I think I actually hurt myself.

Anyway, warning: this deals with depression, and the bad things that can ensue.

* * *

**Condemned to Life**

A one-shot in two parts

**Part I**

She had never thought about suicide.

Well...she'd _thought_ about it, in the abstract, occasionally wondering how deeply depressed, how profoundly _sad_ a person would have to be to consider it as the only solution to a life that had become unendurable. But she had never considered it for herself. She'd never needed to.

She understood a whole lot better now.

Depression, before it lead to suicide, had very little to do with an overabundance of sadness, or indeed an overabundance of _any_ emotion. It was more about a total lack of any emotions _at all._

She sighed deeply, and turned over in her bed, staring through the inky blackness at the window she no longer kept unlocked. Hope had long since fled. Even during the warm weather, when she kept the window cracked, the night locks were in place, exactly as her safety conscious father wanted them to be.

Tired as she was, sleep continued to elude her. She shifted again, rolling on to her back to stare sightlessly at the darkened ceiling.

It seemed like a lifetime since the roiling mess of heartache, grief and rejection caused by Edward's departure had faded into a complete and utter lack of any feelings whatsoever. And that had been absolutely fine by her.

Until it stopped being fine. Eventually, that lack of feelings, comfortable and comforting at first, became a prison she couldn't escape from. Didn't really care enough to escape from. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months until finally she realized she had stopped caring about anything, including herself. She kept it hidden though, engaging in life around her only enough to keep the scrutiny and questions of others at bay. Just enough so that no one decided she needed medication, theraphy, or god forbid, to be put under a psychiatric hold. If her problems had been normal, maybe, just maybe drugs and therapy might have helped; but since she could never be completely honest about what drove her problems - it would be hopeless. So she pretended, day in and day out, that she was coping. That she was normal.

It was absolutely exhausting. And it was getting harder and harder to do every day. She was tired, she was bored, and she just didn't want to do it anymore. As she lay there under the overs, staring straight up at nothing, she abruptly realized that she didn't have to. If she had stopped caring about being alive, didn't that mean which she didn't really care if she died either?

So, for the first time, she actually considered suicide. She considered every aspect of death and dying, not in the abstract this time but personally, _her_ death, _her_ dying, and found that not only didn't the idea didn't frighten or sadden her, it actually filled her with a mild sense of relief.

Why keep fighting then? Why keep trying and pretending? She could just end it, and be done with it all.

But how?

She sat up suddenly, the sheet slipping to her lap. She had an almost full bottle of Percocet left over from when James broke her leg. All she had to do was swallow the pills, get back in to bed and go to sleep, and it would all be over by morning. In that moment of blinding clarity, her heart started pounding, and Bella Swan made a split second decision to end it.

Decision. Alice saw the future when people made decisions. Bella was sure Alice wasn't watching her future; she obviously had never cared enough about Bella for that. But that wasn't necessarily how her gift worked. Sometimes she just _saw_. And if she saw _this_ decision, she would surely intervene.

Bella was on her feet and running through the silent house before those thoughts had even fully formed. Just in case. As she skidded on the rug at the bottom of the stairs, her cell phone, abandoned on her nightstand, started playing the tune associated with her once best friend's number. She didn't even hesitate in her dash to the land line in the kitchen, knowing it would be ringing next, and needing to catch it before it woke Charlie up. Snatching the cordless handset up just as it started ringing, she clutched it to her chest, listening with a pounding heart for sounds from upstairs. When nothing but silence met her, she tentatively raised it to her ear.

"...do it, please don't do it, Bella, Bella, please!" It was Alice, frantic, pleading, almost screaming, her voice rising above the pandemonium that reigned in the background. Bella heard garbled words of inquiry and then shock as someone, possibly Jasper, explained what Alice had seen, an anguished cry and then sobs from Esme, and then the angry, frightened rumble of Emmett's voice.

She listened to it all dispassionately, feeling no more than faint curiosity at the uncharacteristic display of emotions exhibited by the vampire family she once loved as her own. She didn't understand their reactions, but couldn't find it in herself to care.

"Bella?"

"Carlisle." Her voice was flat and expressionless, his made higher than usual by anxiety.

With his next words, he sounded more like himself. Calm. Composed. "Bella, whatever it is, we can work it out together. Please don't do this."

"Why?" she asked, not really interested in the answer.

"Because we love you," he replied. "You are like a daughter to Esme and me. Sweetheart, you're family."

"I don't believe you," she said without rancor, absently picking at the chipped formica of the kitchen counter. "You're just saying that to stop me. If you were family, you wouldn't have left the way you did, without saying goodbye..."

A ringing in the living room startled her, and she moved to the doorway to locate the source of the sound. There, on the side table by the couch, next to an empty bottle of beer, was Charlie's phone, which he _always_ kept by his side because of his job. She had completely forgotten about it, and fortunately, for the first time since she could remember, so had he.

She saw it as a sign. A sympathetic universe had given her a helping hand by causing Charlie to forget his phone when he went to bed that night. Whichever of the Cullens was calling him - and she had no doubt it was one of them - would not be able to reach him so that he could stop her.

Her reprieve would be short lived, that she knew for a fact. Their next step would be to call the police station. If they called now, she had maybe five minutes before a squad car showed up at the house. The knowledge galvanized her into action.

"...did you hear me? Bella?"

"No, I didn't." She started quickly and quietly up the stairs to the bathroom. "But Carlisle, it doesn't matter. It's too late. I'm already dead."

"Honey it's never too late. Please think about what this will do to your parents. Think of the devastation this will cause them. And Edward..." his voice cracked. "My God, this will kill him..." he rasped, sounding like he was speaking to himself.

She barked out a mirthless laugh, freezing at the entrance of the bathroom, listening again for signs that she had roused her father. Her luck held. There was no sound from his bedroom.

"You don't need to worry about that. Edward never cared for me, he told me so himself. I was just a distraction. I wasn't good for him." Quietly she shut the bathroom door, flipping on the light and going to the sink, barely recognizing the pale, lifeless ghost she glimpsed briefly in the mirror as she opened the medicine cabinet and reached for the Percocet.

"He lied! Bella, he lied to you to get you to move on!" Carlisle's voice took on a frantic edge, one she had never heard in the controlled, centuries-old patriarch of the Cullen clan. In the background someone keened in despair, and she heard angry male voices. "He wanted you to have a normal life! He loves you!" Carlisle continued desperately. "You are his mate, you..."

She put the phone down on the edge of the sink and twisted off the cap, tipping as many of the pills into her mouth as she felt she could comfortably swallow and filled up her glass with water, chasing them down. Carlisle was still speaking, though she couldn't make out his words. It didn't matter though. Nothing he could possibly say, nothing_ any_ of them could say could make any difference. She repeated her actions with the pills until she had taken them all, then picked the phone up again.

"...please, Bella, Bella...please..." Esme had taken over, begging, practically chanting, offering mangled protestations of love, her love, Edward's love, Alice's love...words of caring and concern that held no meaning or truth to Bella. She felt a vague regret at causing Esme such grief, and wished she could somehow explain, make her see that this was for the best, that she was absolutely OK with giving up her life.

Because she had once cared about them, Bella stayed on the phone as long as she could, sensing it gave them all hope, despite knowing their hope was in vain. She kept the phone to her ear as she debated taking Charlie's gun, just in case she was found before the drugs took effect, discarding the idea as soon as it born. He might wake up if she tried to enter his room, and she knew that this, right now, would be her only chance in a long while to end her life. She couldn't afford the risk.

She stayed on the phone as it was passed from a sobbing Esme, to a panicked Emmett, to Alice, to Carlisle, and back to Esme again. She stayed on the phone through the pleading and the crying, murmuring soothing, meaningless platitudes, trying to placate _them_ as she walked down the stairs, through the kitchen and out into the back yard. She heard them argue, probably debating their options, while one or the other of them would take the phone and try to talk her out of her course of action. They stumbled back and forth between cajoling, anger, bribes and threats, always coming back to the fact that she was family, that they loved her, that they would come back for her. Anything and everything, she knew, to keep her alive, and all of it well-intended lies. Still she kept the line open, wanting only to offer comfort and assurances, but not knowing how. She stayed on the phone until she was too far away from the house, and the line blissfully, finally went dead.

She dropped the handset to the ground without watching where it fell and continued walking deeper into the woods. Nature was on her side too, it seemed. The sky had uncharacteristically cleared and the moon was full, providing enough light for her to navigate in the gloom of the forest. Even the weather was warm, a fact she was grateful for as she realized she had walked out of the house in the panties and t-shirt she had been sleeping in. She hadn't even thought to put on shoes.

In the distance behind her, she heard the sound of sirens and broke into a jog, tripping only once.

She had no idea how long she ran, then walked, then stopped and just stood. At some point, she realized three things: she was high as a kite, it felt incredibly good, and she didn't want to stand upright anymore. She was in a clearing, and looked for somewhere to hide herself, to delay the chances of anyone finding her in time, then simply sank to her knees where she stood and stretched out on her back in the dew-drenched grass. Come what may, she would go no further.

For the rest of her short life, Bella listened to the sounds of the night and watched the stars as she, and the earth, wheeled slowly below them. She briefly thought of those she was leaving behind, and barely registered how few were the people who would mourn her. Angela, Jacob, Renee, Phil, and Charlie. A short list. Could she have felt anything, it would have been for her father, who relied on her so, and would be left alone.

Soon, she stopped thinking at all. Exhausted, she let sleep claim her. Her eyelids drifted closed for the last time.

As she died, the world kept turning. The nocturnal denizens of the woods came and went, going about their business. The moon continued it's slow arc through the sky, traveling to the horizon and setting beyond it. With its departure the night deepened to black, then lightened again. The morning crept in, darkness gradually fading, and birds started to stir in the trees. Dawn broke, oblivious to the cold, lifeless figure stretched out on its lush bed of green grasses, and life in the forest continued on around it. Time, as always, marched on, relentless.

The sun found her around mid morning, shortly before the large black wolf did. He emerged cautiously into the clearing, his muzzle streched out toward her, his nose twitching, recognizing and confirming the scent of death, and then melted into the deep green shadows again, the rustles of his passing fading into silence. The clearing continued to exist as it always had, silent and unmoved.

Less than an hour later, it would be overrun by people.

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Part II in the next few days.


	2. Chapter 2

**Note:** It took longer than I'd intended, but I found I needed a break from the heartfail. This is the second time I have killed off a character in a story, and like the last time, it didn't hit me until I'd posted it. Posting it makes it somehow real, like I can't take it back anymore. Not even a minute after I posted the first part, I couldn't believe what I'd written, and debated taking it down. But usually once something is out there, that's it for me.

Anyway, here it is. Second and last part of Condemned to Life. I'm kind of glad to put this one behind me.

* * *

**Part II**

Carlisle was approaching the end of his third hour of standing at the window, staring out at the starkly beautiful, desolate, snow covered landscape outside the luxurious but cold cabin that the tattered remnants of his family had called home for the last five years. Far from civilization, it never saw any human visitors and the trappings of humanity such as heat and light had been mostly abandoned. There was solar and wind-powered electricity, but it was used only to power the technological devices that they could no longer live without, that kept them connected to the human world they had left behind. Their home was tastefully decorated and kept scrupulously clean, but it was absolutely devoid of heart and life.

"Is Edward back yet?"

Carlisle turned to his wife with a sad smile. "Not yet," he told Esme. Seeing the worry on her face, he continued. "He'll be back, Esme. He always comes back."

She moved next to him, and his arm automatically reached out to pull her close. "how can you be sure?" She turned, wrapping both arms around his waist and pressing into his side. "What if..." She was unable to continue the thought, and turned her face into the soft cashmere of his turtleneck sweater.

He turned his head, and reaching for her face, tipped her chin up to press a kiss to her forehead. "He won't," he said smiling down at her with more confidence than he felt. "Alice made sure of that."

"Have you heard from her?" she asked hopefully, as she did every day, her lower lip trembling a little. "Have you heard from any of them?"

It tore at his hear to tell her he hadn't. "Nothing since Emmett's call last month," he murmured, holding her a little tighter when a sob caught in her throat. They both fell silent again, staring out of the window, and Carlisle's mind, unbidden, went back to that awful day ten years ago when their lives had been forever changed with that one terrifying vision of Alice's.

~CtL~

He had been in his study when he had heard her scream. The sound, unlike anything he had ever heard coming from her, made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck and arms, and by the time he was down in the living room, she was already on the phone with Bella, pleading for Bella's life.

"What..." He didn't even have time to get his words of inquiry out before a terrified Esme had thrown herself at him.

"Carlisle," she cried over the babel of voices, hands pulling and pushing ineffectually at him as if she wanted him to do something but didn't know where to steer him. "Bella...Alice saw her committing suicide! You have to stop her!"

A fear more intense and crippling than he had ever experienced pulsed through his body, rendering him temporarily powerless to move or think straight. He had imagined a dozen different ways in which their abandoning Bella could end badly, for her, for them, but this...he had never, even in his darkest imagining, thought it could actually come to this.

Before he had managed to pull himself together completely, he had snatched the phone from Alice's hand.

"Bella?" he said, relaxing somewhat when he finally heard her voice. As long as he had her on the line, he was convinced he could still talk her out of this most drastic of steps.

It did not take long for hope to fade. Over his years as a doctor, he had come across quite a few people who had lost the will to live, and he'd learned to recognize that stillness in them, the lack of expression on their blank faces and in their tone. He heard it in Bella, that lack of a life force, and cursed himself and even Edward, briefly, for having left her. In the end, though, it was _his_ fault. As the head of the family, it had been in his power to override his son, but he hadn't. He had let Edward convince him it was for the best, and now they would all of them pay the ultimate price.

Even though he knew it was too late, he did not give up. None of them had. Each and every one of them done absolutely everything in their power to stop her - even Jasper and Rosalie, who mostly cared only because it affected their mates - but it had all been in vain. She hadn't believed a single word of their protestations of love, and why would she? They had left her without notice, without a single word of goodbye. She was right; a true family would not have abandoned her they way they had. It made it all but impossible for them to counter the lies Edward had told her when he left. Their past actions spoke louder than their present words, and there was absolutely no way of convincing Bella that they meant what they said now, that they weren't just saying it to stop her from killing herself.

Alice had tried to call Charlie while he was talking to Bella, but the chief didn't answer his phone. Desperate, she called the Forks Police Department. It wasn't until Carlisle took over, using his standing as the respected Dr Cullen convince them, that they believed Alice's story of a premonition and subsequent phone call to the Chief's daughter, only to find her on the the verge of taking her own life. They dispatched a squad car, but by the time they had roused their chief from his bed, Bella had disappeared.

The Cullens had waited on tenterhooks, all assembled together in the living room, still as statues and not a word spoken until the news they had been both dreading and expecting came shortly before noon.

Bella was dead.

She had been found in a clearing deep in the woods by a troubled young man from the nearby Quilleute reservation. Though an autopsy would be performed, everyone knew an empty bottle of painkillers had been found on the sink in the bathroom. There was no doubt in anyones mind that Bella had taken her own life, and there was no doubt as to why. Carlisle had tried to call Charlie with his condolences, but the conversation, such as it was, had not gone well.

"Your daughter's 'premonition' came a bit late, Dr. Cullen," Charlie sneered coldly. "Where were her premonitions after that son of yours dumped Bella and you all left without so much as a word? You have _no idea _how much that hurt her. It broke her, and she never recovered from it." Carlisle tried to speak, but the Chief either ignored him or didn't hear. "I blame Edward for this, Doctor. He has good as killed her with his own two hands, and you and your family as good as helped him, and if I ever see him again, I will kill him myself. Don't think that I won't. He took the only thing I cared about away from me, and I would happily go to jail for the rest of my life if I could wipe him off the face of the planet." His voice shook. "Your family is no longer welcome in this town, Dr. Cullen. I can't legally stop you from coming back, but know that you are _not_ welcome. You will never be welcome again." There was a click as Chief Swan hung up. Carlisle did not try to contact him again.

It was the beginning of the end of the Cullens as a family unit. Jasper and Alice were the first to leave, mainly for Jasper's sake. Their collected grief - and Rosalie's anger at the disruption Bella had wrought on their lives - were simply too much for him to handle. Though their departure was never meant to be permanent, that's the way it ended up. For Alice, it brought back too many painful memories. Aside from brief visits, they would never live with Carlisle and Esme again.

Rosalie and Emmett were the next to go. They started taking extended vacations that grew in length until they weren't there much more than Alice and Jasper, though they still maintained rooms and technically resided wherever Carlisle and Esme ended up.

As for Edward, he remained ignorant of the devastation he had left in his wake until about five years after Bella's death, and he would have continued to remain ignorant if he hadn't crossed paths with Alice and Jasper in Milan one frigid winter night.

They had all tried to call him while they were trying to talk Bella down from the metaphorical ledge, hoping there was something he could do to stop her. Unfortunately, by then Edward had long since abandoned his phone somewhere, to avoid their endless attempts to contact him and talk him into coming back home. They had had no way of contacting him at all during those five years, and Edward had resisted all temptation to look his soulmate up and find out how she was doing, though he'd almost caved a hundred times a day, every day.

When Alice told him the news, right there on an empty, night-shrouded street, he dropped to his knees on the snow-covered sidewalk, felled by the awful knowledge that the love of his life was no more, that she hadn't even made it a year after he left her. All his hopes for her of the last five years, hopes of a wonderful college experience, of a happy life with friends, family and eventually children somewhere on the same continent he occupied...every day, every hour, he had imagined what she was doing at that very moment, wherever she was, and he had taken comfort from the fact that she was finally living the normal, human life that she would have had if they'd never met. All those hopes and dreams were reduced to bitter ash in a single brutal instant with a few words from Alice. She'd been dead the whole time he had imagined her mumbling in her sleep, going to classes, studying at the library, even holding hands with some shadowy, faceless man as they strolled across the quad on some campus, somewhere.

So powerful was Edward's shock and loss, so overwhelming his grief, that Jasper lost consciousness for the first and last time in his vampire existence. Alice, kneeling in the snow with her mate's head cradled in her lap, saw Edward's plan to go to the Volturi to have them kill him, and immediately, viciously put a stop to it.

"No," she said with more contempt in her tone than he had ever heard. "You don't get to die, Edward. It's too easy. Death is too good for you. You will not do that to Carlisle and Esme, they've been through enough. No...you deserve to live for centuries more with every ounce of pain and grief you now feel." Her voice broke on a sob, but she went on. "You and your damned martyr complex get to live with the what-ifs and the I-should-have-dones, and with the knowledge that you had it all and threw it all away because you thought you knew better than everybody else. Oh God," she cried, "why did I listen to you? Why did I let you talk me into this? Why couldn't I _see_?"

Edward pitched forward under the onslaught of her accusations and self-recrimination, bracing himself on his hands, his face contorted in anguish, his lips peeled back in a silent cry, but still Alice berated him, lashing out, laying the whole rest of his miserable existence out before him until her visions told her he had changed his mind. She was right. Death would be a liberation from the horror that he had wrought, and he didn't deserve to be freed from the consequences of his actions. There would be no relief for him; he decided right then and there that he would live with what he'd done, until somebody killed him or the world came to an end. That would be his penance.

"Go home, Edward," Alice hissed, helping a groggy Jasper to his feet. "Go back to Carlisle and Esme. Live, for them if nothing else." As she looked down at the crumpled, broken form of her brother, she finally thawed. "Go home," she repeated, softly and gently this time, putting her hand on his bowed head for a moment in a kind of twisted benediction. "We'll see you there some day."

With those words, they walked away, leaving him behind for good. Just before they turned the corner, they looked back at him one last time, still caved in on himself and kneeling in the snow on that silent, empty sidewalk, centered in the pool of light from the street lamp. Snowflakes drifted gently down.

It would be a very long time before they saw him again.

~CtL~

At the sound of the front door opening, Esme and Carlisle turned away from the window, clinging to each other and waiting with aching hearts for their son to drift into the room like the ghost he had become.

Esme tore herself away from her husband and floated toward Edward with her arms outstretched, folding him into a motherly hug. She pulled back, holding him at arms length to look at him searchingly. He was a faint echo of the handsome, brooding young man he'd been so many years ago. Unrelenting sorrow had left its mark of hollow cheeks and sunken, lifeless eyes, making the purple shadows beneath them permanent.

_How was it?_

"The flowers are looking really lovely, Esme," he replied in a barely-there voice. "They've really started filling in. They've grown and are spreading toward the center of the clearing..." He stopped, and swallowed convulsively. "Somebody...somebody planted a tree in the center, where...where she..." He still couldn't bring himself to say the words. As for Esme, words had failed her a long time ago and she had none left. There was nothing, not a single thing she could say or do to make this better for him.

After Edward had picked himself up from that sidewalk in Italy, he immediately visited the clearing, and continued to do so every year on the anniversary of her passing. He felt closer to her there than at her gravesite. It was reminiscent of their meadow and the first heady days of their burgeoning love, and the memories were sweet torture, exactly as he deserved. It was Esme who suggested that instead of bringing flowers he should plant some, turning the clearing into a living, colorful memorial to his lost love.

He finally managed to speak again. "I planted crocuses, daffodils and snowdrops underneath..." Once more, his voice petered out and he stared sightlessly into the middle distance, lost in what tortured thoughts, she could only imagine. That was the way of conversations with Edward these days - these years. His attention wandered a lot, and he so often needed to be gently steered back to the subject at hand.

She placed her hands on either side of Edward's dear, gaunt face, drawn downward in unendurable sadness. "That's lovely, Edward." She spoke gently, stroking his cheek to recapture his attention. "They bloom very early in the Spring, so they will provide color before the other plants do."

"Yes, I..." He didn't finish, raising his hand to hers and giving it a weak squeeze, then simply turned and left the room. She listened until she heard the door to his room open and shut, then turned back to Carlisle, who had been morosely watching their exchange. They did not speak, their eyes saying it all, and met in the middle of the room, each taking what small comfort they could in the other's embrace.

Alone in his bedroom, Edward took up his customary position at the window and did what he had condemned himself to do when Alice had told him he didn't deserve to die: he lived. He lived through every perfect second of his life with Bella, he lived through the horror of what he'd done to her and the misery of his years without her, and he lived through the agony of her death. Then he did it all again, hour after hour, day after day, his existence a meaningless blur of past and present, interrupted only by forced interactions with his adoptive parents, or the need to feed, until it was time to visit the clearing again. Such were the decades after Bella was no more; an endless stretch of perpetual twilight in which he was sentenced to a prison of his own devising.

He lived. But that was _all_ he did.


End file.
